Feng Shui Tips for the Bedroom

Feng Shui influences us all of the time, but the feng shui of a bedroom is particularly important. Not only do we spend around 50-60 hours per week in our bedroom (compared to 30-40 hours or less at our desk), but whilst we're asleep our body tries to heal itself from the stresses and traumas of the day.

Avoid having your feet directly in line with the entry door to your bedroom when you sleep (the same applies to the bedroom windows if the window sill is below the height of your body when you sleep). The Chinese call this the “death” position. That seems a bit dramatic, but I've certainly seen people's health and vitality improve once they stop sleeping with their feet opposite the entry door to their bedroom.

Avoid sleeping with your head under the bedroom window. Feng Shui “folk lore” says that this one damages your liver. Acupuncturists will give you chapter and verse on the exact mechanism, but the gist of it is that the energy from the bedroom window enters your body's energy meridians at your head and travels to your liver where it knocks it out of balance. Do it regularly for a few years and you can end up with liver disease.

Avoid sleeping under beams or other things “hanging down” from your bedroom ceiling (including over head cupboards), or 45 degrees off sharp corners which stick into your bedroom, or with a partly open door pointing at you. All of these usually generate sha lines which often result in aches and pains in whichever part of your body gets hit by them. Keeping all of the doors in the bedroom closed when you sleep is a good idea as it usually eliminates a lot of potentially troublesome sha lines.

If your bedroom has sloping ceilings it's a good idea to avoid sleeping with your head near the bedroom wall at the foot of them – it's yet another source of sha.

Avoid sleeping with your head next to a steel radiator, or any other source of magnetism, such as your TV or computer (including those outside your bedroom just the other side of the bedroom wall). The magnetic fields don't do your energy fields any good and they may even be strong enough to influence the directions for whichever feng shui formulas which you use to work out which direction to sleep in (see below). So you end up sleeping in a different magnetic direction to the one in the rest of your bedroom.

Avoid having open mirrors or other reflective surfaces in the bedroom (e.g. large pictures on the wall, a switched off TV screen), as these often result in people not getting a sound nights sleep. If you have them in your bedroom and can't remove them, try covering them over before you go to sleep each night.

Have a solid bedroom wall behind you when you sleep (e.g. don't sleep with a large open space or an open doorway behind the head of your bed).

Avoid sleeping in a direct line with the toilet if it's on the same floor as your bedroom, as these generate sha flows which are often capable of penetrating closed doors and even stud and plaster board walls. If your bedroom has solid brick or stone internal walls, these will usually stop such sha lines.

Be aware of the content and symbolism of any pictures you have on display in your bedroom. They are likely to be among the first things you see each day, and will subtly programme your brain to bring those things into your life (e.g. A picture of a lone person tends to create a single person who doesn’t maintain a long term relationship). Also the content of the picture can interact with the feng shui in that part of your house. It can be for good or ill, it just depends on the specifics of that particular interaction between that picture and the feng shui influences there.

Those are the basic feng shui things to get right in a bedroom, but there are other aspects of the feng shui which can be every bit as important.

Pockets of good and bad influence

In every room there are differences to the qualities of the energy depending where you are in the room. There are basically two categories of these.

Those based on the energy spirals which give rise to the BaGua grid. There are several distinct feng shui formulas which each tell you something about the qualities of those energies, some will drain your energy, others may help your relations with others, or your career, yet other influences will cause you to make poor decisions or get into conflicts. Some of these spirals will put you in control of your surroundings, whilst some put others in control of you. Which influences go where and how they combine with each other are determined by compass directions and position within the building. The control position for instance is sometimes located on the opposite side of the bedroom the door, but not always and it may or may not coincide with other beneficial influences.

There are also an entirely different set of influences which also apply based on the radial direction from the centre of the building. Both sets of Flying star influences (San Yuen and Yuen Hom) together with several of the Sam Hap feng shui formulas and the hexagram influences of Yuen Hom feng shui give useful information about the feng shui influences of a particular sector of the bedroom.

Generally you will find it better to sleep with your head in an area of the bedroom which has beneficial feng shui influences, but finding them is a job for a professional feng shui practitioner, and sometimes it will not be possible to sleep in a beneficial area and face a good direction (see below) as well. Knowing which one is better in a particular situation requires experience.

Directions

Each person reacts a little differently when they receive energy from a particular direction. Some directions are beneficial for them, others are not. There are four methods of determining what kinds of influence a particular direction has.

The simplest (and weakest) is based on the 8 feng shui directions.

Two more are based on the person's BaZi horoscope.

The fourth (and strongest) is based on their hexagrams.

All of them yield useful information but what is a beneficial direction on one calculation may not be on another. Strange as it sounds that can actually be quite useful, because it means that if you inadvertently face a bad direction, there are usually some good feng shui influences there as well, so the overall effect on you is not that bad. On the rare occasions when good feng shui influences coincide and reinforce good and bad feng shui influences coincide and reinforce bad, you need always to face good directions.

There is quite a bit of myth around as to whether it's where your feet point or where your head points that matters. All I can say is that every Chinese feng shui Master who I have personally asked about this have unanimously said that it's where your feet point that matters, and this accords with my own experience.

Generally, soft colours will give a more relaxed feel to the feng shui of a bedroom rather than bright garish colours. But then comes the choice of the actual colours.

Colours interact with the feng shui influences in that part of the building and with the feng shui influences in the individual persons horoscope. Colours can boost energy, or calm it, strengthen problematic influences or harmonise and balance them – it all depends on the particular colour and the feng shui and horoscope influences at that part of the bedroom and in that part of the house.

Finding the best combination of colours is a job for a professional feng shui practitioner, but if you want to at least avoid decorating in colours which throw the feng shui influences further out of balance in your bedroom, you can use the colours here.

DIY TIP

Where we sleep is very important to our well being.

So at the very least avoid sleeping with your feet pointing out of the entry door and/or your head under a window, plus as many of the other things on this page as you sensibly can.

The information on this page will get you started, but if you’d like some further ideas you might want to take a look at these books

I’ve tried to cover some of the basics to help you get started in this section of my web site, but please feel free to contact us if there is something else which you would like to know.